Up Jumps the Devil

6

« ^ » The whole expence of taking up such a run of land as I have mentioned, I mean 640 acres for a plantation to a new settler, will not exceed 10 guineas, between patent, surveyor, and the different offices...“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

Next day I learned why Adam had come home just now: Dick Sutterly had made him a hefty offer for the three acres that had been sitting idle since he and Karen moved to California.

Twenty-five years ago, Adam and Zach were seniors in high school when Karen transferred into the junior class.

It was hand-held calculators all over again.

Adam came home from their second date and told Daddy and Mother that he wanted to marry her immediately after graduation. The standard arguments against a youthful marriage were advanced, but they would have had better luck arguing him out of computers.

As usual, Adam had already worked out most of the details beforehand. He would take the money he’d saved for a new car and buy a used mobile home instead. If Daddy would give him a place to put it and if Haywood, who had a backhoe, would help them dig a well and septic tank, he and Karen would live there as frugally as field mice and both would commute to their schools. It would be cheaper than paying room and board in a dorm.

“I’ll work out our living expenses in the summers, she’ll go to college full-time, and we’ll both have our undergrad degrees in four years.”

“And what if she has a baby?” Daddy asked.

Adam couldn’t help grinning at that question because the younger boys always used to wonder if the reason he’d fathered eleven sons was because 1) he really wanted that many, 2) he wanted a daughter so bad he didn’t care how many boys it took, or 3) he simply didn’t understand the mechanics of reproduction.

“News flash, Daddy—science has discovered how babies are made.”

“You getting smart with me, boy?” Daddy asked gruffly.

But by then, Mother was laughing, too, so Adam knew he’d won.

And because he himself would never have lived on land he didn’t hold clear title to, Daddy had deeded Adam a three-acre site on the far edge of his holdings, big enough for a trailer and a good-sized vegetable garden.

Back then, raw farmland was going for about six to eight hundred an acre. Nowadays, such land runs three to six thousand, and a single-acre building lot can bring as much as ten or twelve if it has good road frontage.

Adam’s three acres (2.9 acres, to be precise) shared an easement lane with Gray Talbert’s nursery. There was barely thirty feet of road frontage and the lot was so awkwardly shaped that you really couldn’t put three houses on it and meet county building regulations. So why was Dick Sutterly offering him forty-five thousand dollars? That was way more than it was worth.

“For that matter,” said Seth, “how’s a low-end developer like Sutterly pay that kind of money?”

“Lower your voice,” said Adam. “I promised him we’d keep this quiet.”

It was noon recess and Adam, Seth, and I were in the courthouse basement, in the deed book section of the Register of Deeds office, looking for the plat of Adam’s land.

Not counting that first baby boy that was stillborn more than thirty-five years before my birth, Seth is Daddy’s seventh son. Daddy still makes his own decisions, but being in his eighties now, he doesn’t have the same zest he used to have for snaking out all the details that inform those decisions. Seth is levelheaded and intelligent, and his and Minnie’s farm is right next door to the homeplace, so more and more these days, Daddy relies on him to look into things like this and bring home the facts.

The last time I’d been down here to check on a deed, the place was as quiet as a library and nearly empty except for genealogists diligently sticking twigs back on their family trees by tracing land divisions from one generation to the next.

Now the room buzzed with muted questions and conversations. Almost all the counter space was taken up by paralegals doing title searches and real estate people looking for greener pastures to develop. Adam wasn’t the first to get a tempting offer and Sutterly doesn’t have a monopoly on bulldozers. Ever since I-40 opened, we’ve all had bids for bits and pieces of our land, and we’ve all said no thank you.

“Why are we even wasting our time here?” I asked, checking the deed book by the number on Adam’s deed. “It’s not like you’re going to sell.”

Adam lifted up the big heavy leather-bound book I’d pointed to, carried it over to a counter that had one end clear, and began turning the pages. “Page one-oh-eight, was it?”

I looked at Seth, who shrugged.

“Are you?” I asked in a sharper voice.

Adam gave an impatient twist of his shoulder. “I just want to see what’s happening, okay?”

The three of us put our heads together over page 108 and got ourselves oriented.

“Possum Creek,” said Seth, pointing to a wavy line that ran from northeast to southwest and is a major boundary between Knott land to the north and the Stancil farm to the south.

A hundred and thirty years ago, everything south of Possum Creek to a dirt road running roughly east to west had belonged to the Pleasant family. Leo Pleasant still owns a big chunk along the road to the west, but when the original holding was broken up, Jap Stancil’s grandfather got the eastern part bounded by the creek, Old Forty-Eight and the dirt road. G. Hooks Talbert’s great-grandmother got a piece back off the road, along the creek. Another Pleasant son, Merrilee Yadkin Grimes’s great-grandfather, also got land along the creek, and I believe it was Merrilee’s grandmother who sold it to Daddy sometime in the late forties.

So now, moving west from Old Forty-Eight along the south bank of Possum Creek, the land divisions on this plat were labeled J. Stancil, G. H. Talbert and K. Knott, with L. Pleasant lying south of Daddy. Adam’s little piece formed a triangular wedge between Knott and Talbert land on the north, Stancil to the east and Pleasant to the west.

The Talbert piece has no road frontage and Gray Talbert’s nursery would be landlocked were it not for a narrow lane that runs along the western edge of the Stancil farm, right on the line beside Adam. Indeed, when their house trailer was there, Adam and Karen had used the lane as a driveway, too, rather than go to the trouble of putting in their own drive where the southern tip of their triangle touched the road. Jap Stancil still owned the lane back then and didn’t mind two more people using it.

By now, the easement has existed for well over fifty years, so even if Mr. Jap or Dallas had wanted to close it, that was no longer their option. As long as Talberts want to use it, the lane has to stay open.

Land squabbles show up in district court so frequently that I know all about easement encroachments and suddenly it began to make sense that Adam was being offered that ridiculous amount.

“G. Hooks Talbert must want to develop this parcel,” I said. “I saw surveyor’s ribbons all along the creek. But to build houses back there, county regulations require a fifty-foot-wide road and there’s only this ‘cart’ lane, which by definition is thirty feet wide. Your little stretch of road front, Adam, would give him all he needs to meet the requirements.”

“That’s crazy,” Adam objected. “Why wouldn’t he just get ol’ Jap Stancil—he’s still living, isn’t he?—to sell him a wider strip?”

“Because Mr. Jap deeded all his land to Dallas years ago,” I said. “Didn’t Zach tell you about Dallas?”

“Oh, yeah. Shot by his wife, was it?”

“She bought the gun. Her son-in-law’s the one that pulled the trigger.”

“Poor old Dallas. Lived in a nest of rattlesnakes, didn’t he?”

“The trials could drag out for a year or more,” I said. “If Cherry Lou is found guilty, Dallas’s estate will pass to Mr. Jap, but nothing can be done about establishing ownership till after the trial.”

“Dick Sutterly’s the one who tried to buy from Dallas,” Seth mused. “Wonder if he approached Leo Pleasant, too?”

It didn’t take much digging to find the book that recorded Leo Pleasant’s deed, but we had to wait till someone from Ed Whitbread’s office finished using it When we opened it to the right page, we found that it was marked by a slip of paper that held a column of three scribbled numbers that added up to the total acreage of Pleasant, Talbert and Stancil land. Almost as an afterthought, whoever had used that scrap of paper had added a fourth figure to the total: 2.9—the precise size of Adam’s triangle.

There were no subsequent conveyances in the index to indicate that it’d recently changed hands.

“Means nothing,” I said. “You don’t have to record a deed until you’re ready for it to be public record.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Adam said, as he studied the plat carefully. “The Pleasant farm must have a mile of road frontage, but what use is that to Sutterly if he’s really bent on developing the Talbert piece? With Stancil land tied up in a murder trial, the only other way to get to it is through mine or Dad’s and we all know how he feels abut selling.”

Something in Adam’s voice made me begin to wonder: Just how badly did my successful brother need forty-five thousand dollars?

I couldn’t ask him then and there because Nadine and Herman were expecting him for lunch and Seth wanted to get on back to the farm. He keeps a few hogs for the family freezers and one of them was due to farrow that evening.

But when I saw Dick Sutterly heading down the hall toward the Register of Deeds, I called to him.

No reason he couldn’t tell me what was going on.

“Adam promised me he wouldn’t talk about this to anybody,” Sutterly said, glancing around as if we were about to exchange plans to blow up the Kremlin.

Late thirties, early forties, Dick Sutterly has light strawberry blond hair, a round face that gets pink when he’s excited and a waistline that isn’t porky yet, but will be if he keeps riding around in his truck all day. I used to see him out in denims and work boots, with sawdust in his hair. Now he wears a shirt and tie under his windbreaker and split-leather brogans on his feet. No sawdust either.

We were in my chambers, a bare room with a single desk and three chairs. I was lunching on a Pepsi and a pack of Nabs from the vending machines over in the old part of the courthouse. With court due to resume in fifteen minutes, it was all the lunch I had time for.

“If word gets out, it could send land prices right through the roof,” Sutterly told me.

Some big secret. As if he’s the only one who’s noticed the escalation of land prices in Colleton County these past few years.

Dick Sutterly’s just an opportunist who happens to be in the right place at the right time. His father was an itinerant carpenter who built a Skilsaw, three nail aprons, and two jackleg helpers into a small construction company that Dick took over when the older man had a heatstroke one summer. From building modest individual houses to order, he began building two or three at a time on speculation.

Those were leveraged into ten- and fifteen-house strip plats, and these became sixty- and eighty-house subdivisions with streets and cul-de-sacs.

“Now I’ve got the chance for something really big,” he said, his cheeks turning pink. “All I need is Adam’s little scrap of land and I’m in business.”

More than that he wouldn’t say.

“Leo Pleasant in on this?” I asked. “G. Hooks Talbert?”

Sutterly’s cheeks got pinker and pinker but my lunch break ended before I could break him.